Today's article is about showing asterisks as the password is typed...

KGIII

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Ubuntu doesn't do this and doesn't do this because of shoulder surfing reasons. So, it's a security thing. How much security does it provide? That's up to you to decide. If you want feedback in the form of asterisks while typing passwords in the terminal, this is how you do it.

Astute folks will realize this is an article from the original site. It's mostly re-written, but the end result is the same.


Feedback is awesome, though I'll be in and out this weekend.
 


I would be on topic regarding hiding a password looking at title , on topic if it was about typing text into text fields and chars are replaced by a dot , but off topic if i bring in forms and php; so that would make me ¾ on topic , rounding off to nearest integer - hey i'm completely on topic !

So this is how you hide someone typing in password in a form (where POST can be used ) using bootstrap php :

Code:
<div class="form-group"> 
			    <label for="userPassword">Password</label>
			    <input type="password" name="userPassword" id ="usrPassword" class="form-control"  required = "required"   /><br />
			     </div>

@KGIII you can of course delete my post
 
The only distro I know of that displays asterisks in the terminal when you type your password is Linux Mint.


I never have seen any pertinent reason why that was created by the Linux Mint developers however I'm sure there's a reason why it was done.

Here's the hack that can be applied to stop the asterisks.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
@KGIII you can of course delete my post

It's all good.

I never have seen any pertinent reason why that was created by the Linux Mint developers

It used to be more common as the default and it's there to provide feedback when you are typing. It's a question that gets asked fairly regularly on sites like AskUbuntu. (Though it surely has been answered there numerous times. In fact, I think my notes come from an answer I once wrote covering just this question.)

In a way, it's rather Unix-y philosophically to show the asterisks - as all inputs should provide some output.
 
I thought this sounded familiar!

Indeed! I have all the article (well, those worth keeping) from the old site to move to the new site. I tend to use them (as they still need to be rewritten and reformatted to fit the new site) when I'm low on time or motivation.

My goal is to keep going for a year, so it's gonna take a while.
 
@Nelson Muntz , Thank you for that link to disable the asterisks in terminal.

Also in that article is the following comment re why disable vs uninstall

  • Q. You say to rename that configuration,and I'd agree that deleting the configuration would be a hack. But I don't see why uninstalling the package would be a problem. You could always reinstall it if you need to. That was my question: why mess with the system configuration when you could just cleanly uninstall the package? – Robert Dec 28 '19 at 16:57
  • A Deleting such security packages is really a huge problem. The asterisk is a part of the lib's functionality. Uninstalling the whole lib would be a really big security issue. Combined with custom user's preferences and configuration would make it much worst. In any case, I for one believe that off/on exist in order to use them properly and that's why I proposed this answer. – dpapadopoulos Dec 28 '19 at 17:36

 

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